intersections of African and diasporic intellectual history, comparative literature, religious studies, and the politics of knowledge production.
Marsh applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities, and shared the following:
The reader of page 99 of Textual Life will find themselves in an extended citation of a treatise on French colonial policy towards Islam. It is there that Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864-1945), the Muslim scholar from Northern Senegal who wrote a monumental history of West Africa, first appears in colonial records. Although the document is far from great literature it would become very influential in how Islam in the region would become theorized, made policy, and institutionalized in practice. “Islam noir” has become a short-hand to describe a racializing idea and process that sought to distinguish and isolate West African Muslims from their co-religionists throughout the world. Kamara’s appearance here speaks to how fundamental he was to colonial knowledge production and how perplexing it is that he is not better known. The rest of the page provides an in-depth commentary on the passage.Visit Wendell H. Marsh's website and learn more about Textual Life at the Columbia University Press website.
The test succeeds, in a sense. Textual Life is a parable about the fate of humanistic scholarship amid political, technological, and epistemic change through the life, work, and reception of a prolific but poorly known African Muslim intellectual. Page 99 takes us to the crux of that story’s conflict: the will to know the colonies as a will to have power over them created the paradoxical condition in which knowledge was solicited but becomes distorted through the imperatives of strategic interest. We get several of the major plays in this drama and a sense of what was at stake. In addition to the substantive relevance this page’s part to the whole, there is also a fundamental quality of the book well represented here. As a kind of philology, the book takes seriously the value of commentary.
At the same time, page 99 obscures as much as it reveals. Chapters One and Two as well as Five and Six are all about what the colonial encounter fails to contain. In this book, Kamara becomes an aperture into a literary theory of Arabic in West Africa, a rich tradition that warrants more research. He also illuminates the place of dreams in the Muslim imaginary in West Africa as well as the intellectual struggles that have defined debates in the Sahel during the period of decolonization and since the War on Terror. The meaning of the parable of Kamara is that the restriction placed on knowledge by colonial power is only short-lived. It would be tragic for the reader to miss that message.
--Marshal Zeringue
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